Art
For the past year, an exhibit at the Oakland Black Panther Party Museum has educated visitors about the community school model that was launched by the Panthers in 1973 and has since been incorporated into every Oakland Unified School District building. Recently, the exhibit’s reach was expanded, thanks to the efforts of a Madison Park Academy student and the nonprofit Ocelotl, which worked to translate the exhibit into Spanish. “The Black Panther Party, they brought communities together, and I feel…
Cava Menzies could feel the warm sun pouring into her bedroom as she sat in silence, eyes closed, legs crossed, engaged in meditation. Menzies, a founding faculty member and music teacher at the Oakland School for the Arts, often draws creative inspiration during morning meditation in her downtown Oakland apartment. But this meditation session in February 2022 brought a revelation. After her practice, Menzies wrote CO-LLAB Choir on her whiteboard, her intuition telling her to create an adult ensemble group. …
Sydney Seibold uses art to tell stories about her experience as an Asian American. Seibold, 16, a student at Gateway to College, was born in Tokyo to a Thai parent and immigrated to Oakland at age 3. Her boldly colored drawing of the yak, a figure in Thai culture that sits in front of sacred buildings to protect them from spiritual threats, is one of 50 digital and photographic works in the Oakland Asian Cultural Center’s 10th annual youth art…
“The Nutcracker” ballet has been performed at Christmastime for more than 100 years, but not quite the way the Oakland Ballet is staging it this weekend. “Graham Lustig’s The Nutcracker” isn’t set in the stuffy Victorian era, but in the looser early 20th century, when women had ditched their corsets and upped their hems, when they had sidestepped convention for free thinking. “A birth of intellectualism for women, when women were fighting for suffrage, riding bicycles and had a different…
The siege of Gaza played out before a packed house at Oakland’s Regal Jack London theater, where the documentary “Bisan,” created by Palestinian journalist and filmmaker Bisan Owda about her daily life, had a rare screening Wednesday. Some in the audience cried softly as they bore witness to the horrors of Israel’s 2023-24 siege of Gaza: buildings falling, bombs exploding, children screaming. The documentary was compiled entirely from social media clips shot by Owda. Her posts have found a large…
On the side of a nondescript Temescal building, a tableau is coming alive in a vibrant array of blues, oranges and reds. An artist on a ladder, spray paint in hand, adds the final touches, catching the eye of a passerby, who yells, “It looks great,” as he drives by. Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith smiles and waves, then returns to her work. “Murals are cool because you’re out here connecting with other human beings,” the artist said. “Because you’re outside all day, I’m…
With Oakland facing a roughly $80 million hole in the city budget, a heralded new program to bring film productions to town is on the chopping block. The Film Rebate Incentive Program, an effort to lure film and television with rebates on production costs, was approved unanimously in July by the City Council. The $600,000 initiative was left out of a contingency budget that was adopted because the city has not yet received anticipated payments from the $125 million sale…
In the middle of a downtown Oakland studio, two artists stand on opposite sides of a canvas with brushes at the ready. They have no prompt, only 20 minutes to paint something. Music blares as the minutes tick down. Zoë Boston and Bud Snow are first up, and dozens of people begin to orbit the artists as their brushes hit the canvas. They went through the drill, as did a host of other artists, to raise money for a local…
When photographer Malcolm Ryder first moved to Oakland, the place he saw through his camera lens was different from what he saw on the news. “I became super sensitive to the incredible disparity between what was actually in Oakland and how it is usually portrayed in mass media. The mass media portrayal is not just borderline hostile, it is outright hostile. It doesn’t even make room for the possibility that the city could be or can be a better place,”…